More miscellaneous news

The developers behind the recently announced Apocalypse Now Kickstarter campaign took to Reddit to answer questions about the game. You can read some of the more interesting segments from that Q&A session HERE. At the moment it looks like it won't reach it's goal raising a little over $151,000 which is far short of the required budget to make such a game.

In other news recent controversy over dropped stretch goals and poor communication from InXile, currently developing Torment: Tides of Numenera, has led them to apologize in a recent article from Eurogamer. You can see some of that here:

Torment: Tides of Numenera developer inXile has issued an apology, following the discovery that certain stretch goals promised in the game's then-record-breaking 2013 crowdfunding campaign have not materialised.

The discovery was made using leaked Achievements from the final game, due 28th February on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The most notable omissions include missing companions - I'll discuss those in detail further down, underneath a statement inXile has sent me, so I can keep any potential spoilers out of the way - and no Italian language support. If you are an Italian backer and this is a deal-breaker you can now claim a refund.

But the most glaring issue is not the missing content - which some inXile staff members have tried to explain on the company's forum and on Reddit - but that backers, people who funded the game, are only now finding out, off the back of their own detective work no less. Why didn't inXile say something before?

Torment: Tides of Numenera creative lead Colin McComb replied.

"We did have to cut some content, and had to make some difficult decisions based on lengthy internal prototyping, budgeting, and scheduling considerations," he told me. "Some of our initial ideas didn't pan out as we had hoped, and some of them would have cost us content that we felt was more important for the overall experience of the game. Game development is never a straight line, and it's extraordinarily rare for a project to go unchanged from vision to completion.

"We should have communicated the cuts earlier," he added, "when they happened. Unfortunately, because we were busy finishing and polishing the game, we neglected to reach out to our community and explain the changes that were necessary. Please know that we absolutely and sincerely apologise to our backers for that lack of communication.

"We're extraordinarily grateful to all our backers who made it possible for us to get this far. We are currently considering ways to integrate ideas that didn't make it into the initial launch, and we promise that any potential future expansions or content will be made available for free to all backers."

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Sunless Skies, a planned sequel of Sunless Seas - a very good roguelike/RPG with excellent writing - just went live on Kickstarter as well. It's very apocalyptic in nature as well as borrowing several elements from Lovecraft. Check it out. Sunless Skies is scheduled to launch in May 2018.

I never liked the idea of stretch goals in the first place. Like, oh we have an estimate of how much budget we'll need to create the game but if we get even more of a budget then we'll have this thing and that thing and those things.

I'd rather there be no stretch goals. If it goes over the asked for budget then that money will simply go into fleshing out what they have already promised. That way they won't have to promise to do anything at all but make a damn good game and if they deliver a damn good game then I guess the extra cash was worth it.

Honestly, the best kickstarters I have been part of were the ones where developers did exactly what Colin says they shouldn't be doing. I'd much prefer the 'it's midnight, I'm drunk, here are some stories' approach instead of the 'here is the monthly offering prepared by our PR team.'

In other news recent controversy over dropped stretch goals and poor communication from InXile, currently developing Torment: Tides of Numenera, has led them to apologize in a recent article from Eurogamer.

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My theory is that the less a kickstarter developer communicates with the backers, the better the end product will be. Too much end user input neuters all the game's best ideas.

Conversely, if you don't trust the developer enough to develop a product without micromanagement, you shouldn't back it in the first place.

Of course, I could be very wrong here. But I don't think so, in this case.

You could have picked a better source. Anyway, this is terrible. Zenimax doesn't the money or technology to pull VR and yet they won money for a side project that the company has no interest made a former employee.

You could have picked a better source. Anyway, this is terrible. Zenimax doesn't the money or technology to pull VR and yet they won money for a side project that the company has no interest made a former employee.

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The source doesn't matter in this case. Not like IGN is any better. Could have used Forbes or something.

Quite frankly, after WL2, TToN, TBT and now WL3 they shouldn't need to use crowdfunding anymore in the first place.

Crowdfunding should be a way to get a project you couldn't get funded into production. But once you have a game or two under your belt you should budget the income from those games acordingly for production of future games. Relying on crowdfunding constantly is just a bad idea in the first place. Hell, didn't they already have a couple of million devoted for WL3 that they are paying out of their own pocket? Why do they even need to use crowdfunding in the first place then?

I'd be sad if it was the end of crowdfunding because despite some fuck ups I do still like the idea of developers who are not able to get funding through other means to create the kind of games they want to to be able to fund them directly through their potential audience. But there has to be a time when it needs to stop. A time where the developers have to be able to stand on their own feet without the need of assistance.

And oh, gee, I dunno, maybe not overbudget shit. Maybe not bloat the budget for each game. Such as dialogue animations and voice acting and super mega pretty graphics. (I'm looking at you, Wasteland 3. I enjoyed Age Of Decadence and Underrail far more than Wasteland 2 and those games focused on the gameplay and RPG aspect and not being pretty, just having good art design)

So why do they have to crowdfund? They already have an engine they can license again which has a ton of assets and resources already complete from Wasteland 2. Shouldn't they be able to fund a similar sized team for the same amount of money (which I think they've already sunk into WL3) or hell, use a smaller budget since a lot of work is already done?

I don't want any of the cRPG crowdfundings to fail. I want them to succeed and give us as good of games as possible. But this 'really' should be the last damn time that InXile uses crowdfunding. You're a big boi now, Fargo. Time to handle your own shit and stop asking for handouts.

I really hope that if it is the end of crowdsourcing then it is for InXile only. It's time for them to kick away the crutches and walk.

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And on something completely offtopic. Didn't they license Meantime and Van Buren? Are they ever gonna do anything with those two? Cause they'd be IP's they could probably get away with crowdsourcing as they could go "ey, look, we dunno if they'll be successful enough on their own merits and we don't want a development on them to be a nail in the coffin for the company so let's see how many of 'you' actually want to see this thing happen, oh and Meantime/Van Buren is [explains what the fuck they actually are]" or something.

Quite frankly, after WL2, TToN, TBT and now WL3 they shouldn't need to use crowdfunding anymore in the first place.

Crowdfunding should be a way to get a project you couldn't get funded into production. But once you have a game or two under your belt you should budget the income from those games acordingly for production of future games. Relying on crowdfunding constantly is just a bad idea in the first place. Hell, didn't they already have a couple of million devoted for WL3 that they are paying out of their own pocket? Why do they even need to use crowdfunding in the first place then?

I'd be sad if it was the end of crowdfunding because despite some fuck ups I do still like the idea of developers who are not able to get funding through other means to create the kind of games they want to to be able to fund them directly through their potential audience. But there has to be a time when it needs to stop. A time where the developers have to be able to stand on their own feet without the need of assistance.

And oh, gee, I dunno, maybe not overbudget shit. Maybe not bloat the budget for each game. Such as dialogue animations and voice acting and super mega pretty graphics. (I'm looking at you, Wasteland 3. I enjoyed Age Of Decadence and Underrail far more than Wasteland 2 and those games focused on the gameplay and RPG aspect and not being pretty, just having good art design)

So why do they have to crowdfund? They already have an engine they can license again which has a ton of assets and resources already complete from Wasteland 2. Shouldn't they be able to fund a similar sized team for the same amount of money (which I think they've already sunk into WL3) or hell, use a smaller budget since a lot of work is already done?

I don't want any of the cRPG crowdfundings to fail. I want them to succeed and give us as good of games as possible. But this 'really' should be the last damn time that InXile uses crowdfunding. You're a big boi now, Fargo. Time to handle your own shit and stop asking for handouts.

I really hope that if it is the end of crowdsourcing then it is for InXile only. It's time for them to kick away the crutches and walk.

[edit]

And on something completely offtopic. Didn't they license Meantime and Van Buren? Are they ever gonna do anything with those two? Cause they'd be IP's they could probably get away with crowdsourcing as they could go "ey, look, we dunno if they'll be successful enough on their own merits and we don't want a development on them to be a nail in the coffin for the company so let's see how many of 'you' actually want to see this thing happen, oh and Meantime/Van Buren is [explains what the fuck they actually are]" or something.

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I won't pretend to know their finances (it'd be interesting if they could be more transparent about that, but it's probably not an option), but inXile and similar sized companies have been around for a while making somewhat successful games, and yet they were never able to fund any of this stuff until KS became an option. Seems like even successful developers end up needing either a publishing deal or some other source of funds. On the other hand, that hasn't been true of a lot of the indie devs that I follow, but they must have much smaller teams and projects. Sounds like they have some money in the projects already, but they need more for the scope of it. Dunno. All of the studios that had early success have come back for more crowdfunding with their sequels or other projects; Larian, Obsidian, inXile, Double Fine... I kind of agree with you, but it seems to be the preferred method for them now.

I don't think this is even remotely the end of crowdfunding. Plenty of projects have been and are delivering well-received games, and plenty of others are just getting started.

It's not going to last forever though.
Sooner or later those training wheels are coming off and if they aren't ready to ride that bike without a helping hand on the shoulder then I don't think it'll end well for them.

If money is really that much of a concern then why don't they just change their art style for the games so that it doesn't need to be graphically impressive? That'd cut cost down, right?

Anyway, TToN has yet to be released but once it and Bards Tale 4 has been released, then, well, they have 3 games under their belt that they are generating money from. Maybe they do still need to rely on crowdfunding but at some point it has to stop. At some point they need to be able to generate enough money to fund their games out of their own pocket.